The notion of `production' here—in the case of primitivism, also: `governance'—is therefore central to the non-Humean nature of both primitivism and dispositionalism. The above standard characterization of these conceptions has obvious temporal aspects, since `the total state of the universe' is grounded in its initial state (prima facie, `production' actually just is a temporal notion)See [1]}: “The basic temporal asymmetry of past-to-future underlines the very notion of production itself, so that without it there can be no production.”. In many ways, time is a fundamental dimension in which the laws operate (`govern') or in which the dispositions or powers manifest themselves, producing their effects. Indeed, [1]} explicitly takes time and the passage of time as ontologically primitives, part of his “Non-Humean Package” (182) along with the fundamental laws.The situation is a bit less explicit in the literature on dispositionalism, partly because it is in general more metaphysical and tends to pay less attention to physics than does Maudlin's primitivism.
